Unable to delete partition

[Gary Kirkpatrick]

I need to rid myself of a partition, upon which I happen to have installed
Kubuntu. Gparted won't permit it. It says "please unmount any partition
greater than 5." The partition is sda5, so the response is not logical.
Unmount is greyed out. Tried to do the same procedure in Partition Eidtor
after booting from a live cd, same results. Any suggestions? Current
version of ubuntu is in sda7.

Thanks for any suggestions and assistance.

Gary
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[Nils Kassube]

Post by Gary Kirkpatrick
I need to rid myself of a partition, upon which I happen to have
installed Kubuntu. Gparted won't permit it. It says "please unmount
any partition greater than 5." The partition is sda5, so the response
is not logical. Unmount is greyed out.

Yes, it is geyed out for sda5, but you should umount the other logical
partitions. And if one of the locical partitions is your swap partition,
switch off swap as well (command "sudo swapoff -a" in a terminal).

Deleting logical partitions is a bit tricky because they will be renamed
afterwards, i.e. sda6 becomes sda5, sda7 becomes sda6, etc. Therefore the
other partitions may not be in use. And take care of /etc/fstab
and /boot/grub/menu.lst of your current system, if you are still using
device names instead of UUIDs for partition.

Post by Gary Kirkpatrick
Tried to do the same procedure
in Partition Eidtor after booting from a live cd, same results. Any
suggestions? Current version of ubuntu is in sda7.

I suppose one of the logical partitions sda5, sda6, etc. is your swap
partition which would be used by the live CD automatically. Then you
should switch off swap first (see above).


Nils

[Karl Larsen]

Post by Nils Kassube

Post by Gary Kirkpatrick
I need to rid myself of a partition, upon which I happen to have
installed Kubuntu. Gparted won't permit it. It says "please unmount
any partition greater than 5." The partition is sda5, so the response
is not logical. Unmount is greyed out.

Yes, it is geyed out for sda5, but you should umount the other logical
partitions. And if one of the locical partitions is your swap partition,
switch off swap as well (command "sudo swapoff -a" in a terminal).
Deleting logical partitions is a bit tricky because they will be renamed
afterwards, i.e. sda6 becomes sda5, sda7 becomes sda6, etc. Therefore the
other partitions may not be in use. And take care of /etc/fstab
and /boot/grub/menu.lst of your current system, if you are still using
device names instead of UUIDs for partition.

Post by Gary Kirkpatrick
Tried to do the same procedure
in Partition Eidtor after booting from a live cd, same results. Any
suggestions? Current version of ubuntu is in sda7.

I suppose one of the logical partitions sda5, sda6, etc. is your swap
partition which would be used by the live CD automatically. Then you
should switch off swap first (see above).
Nils

My fix would be to just put a new file system on that /dev/sda5 and
it is ready for another load when you want it. To do this use $ sudo
mkfs.ext3 -L name /dev/sda5 and it is done. Your new partition is ready
to go.

Karl

[xerces8]

Post by Gary Kirkpatrick
I need to rid myself of a partition, upon which I happen to have installed
Kubuntu. Gparted won't permit it. It says "please unmount any partition
greater than 5." The partition is sda5, so the response is not logical.
Unmount is greyed out. Tried to do the same procedure in Partition Eidtor
after booting from a live cd, same results. Any suggestions? Current
version of ubuntu is in sda7.

Use fdisk, which is less anal. (read: it will delete the partition without complaining)

Of course if Ubuntu haven't given attention to the problem of "which partition is which",
your setup will stop working. (after reboot, if not sooner)

But that is OK for a regular user, I guess.

Sarcastically yours,
David